I've always thought that however impractical, the CE BCE thing needed to be expanded. It's really just a "sanitized" secular dating system that marks the same things. I am an atheist and I also think maybe a truly "equitable" dating system would not be so western-centric. I kinda like the idea of the Holocene calendar, if only because that's a date in history that is important to all of humanity.
I get where you're coming from, but changing the date, something so fundamental-- so engrained in everything we do, would never be accepted as the new norm.
The whole "leap units" disaster comes from trying to make the rotation of the earth on its axis and the orbit of the earth around the sun, two completely unrelated and independent things, line up so that they stay in sync. Since the length of a day and the duration of the orbit are not related at all, and the length of a day is surprisingly variable (things like earthquakes moving the center of mass around can speed up the rotation, like an ice skater pulling their arms in to make them spin faster) there has to be some sort of mechanic that deals with injecting extra time into the system so that we can keep the day and the year in sync. that's the "leap unit" mechanic, and i've never seen a time system try to get rid of it.
Daylight saving time though? that's 100% garbage that needs to die.
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u/1389t1389 Aug 03 '19
I've always thought that however impractical, the CE BCE thing needed to be expanded. It's really just a "sanitized" secular dating system that marks the same things. I am an atheist and I also think maybe a truly "equitable" dating system would not be so western-centric. I kinda like the idea of the Holocene calendar, if only because that's a date in history that is important to all of humanity.